This is my textually terse but visually abundant submission to TheHouse Next Door contributors’ 2007 wrap-up.

It has been a delight this past year to have The House Next Door as a generous channel for my quest to watch the 1000 greatest films of all time. I’m grateful for all of the feedback and insights offered. Special thanks to Keith for joining me in the first of what I hope to be a series of collaborations with critics and bloggers on the video essays that have helped to elevate this project from being a mere list-checking exercise.

Despite a setback in the project due to a major reshuffling of the list at the end of last month, which effectively puts me back to where I was a year ago in this project, I will continue this year to watch, write and video-ize the remaining 98 films on the list. The increase in the number of films left to see has reinforced my intention not to rush this project to completion, and that I’d rather get a lot out of watching a handful of films than get through a lot of films in a handful of days or weeks. The mantra remains, it’s not how many films you see, but how much you see in them – a credo that I think is upheld by the often stunningly insightful pieces found on The House.

I should mention that the change in # of films I have seen has induced the need for a new numbering system, since some of the films I have seen for the blog are no longer on the official list of 1000. I will designate those films with a parenthetical number corresponding to its order in which I watched it for the blog [i.e. Hold Me While I'm Naked, which was the second film I saw for the blog but is no longer on the list, is now x(2)]. Films that are still on the list will be denoted by their present order in my project as well as the order in which I watched it for the blog [i.e. Il Posto, the 937th film I saw on the former top 1000 and the 39th that I watched for the blog, and is now the 901st film that I've seen in the current 1000 will be re-numbered as 901(39)]. Hopefully this will make sense as we go on.

Enough of taxonomic headaches – let’s play. To celebrate the past year of Shooting Down Pictures, I would like to present a series of screen grabs from several of the films I saw as part of the project. I’m shamelessly ripping off Nathaniel at The Film Experience by offering screen grabs from the 20th minute and 07th second of films I saw in 2007. Tell you what, I’ll even throw in a prize a la Filmbrain — the one who guesses the most screen grabs correctly will receive a DVD (or else some digital version) of any of the 41 TSP films I saw last year (where available – I highly doubt if Ernie Gehr’s Still is on video) Full list can be found on my blogroll. I’m feeling generous in the weeks I have left of earning a steady income, before I embark on another venture…

Listed by ascending order of personal preference – good luck:

#17:

#16:

#15: (this is probably the hardest to guess):

#14:

#13:

#12:

#11:

#10:

#9:

#8:

#7:

#6:

#5:

#4:

#3:

#2:

#1:

Bonus images (for tiebreaker purposes): These aren’t from the 20:07 mark, but nonetheless they are from some of my favorite films seen as part of the SDP project:
a)

I couldn’t begin to guess on most of these, but I’m dying to know the answers. I’ll be watching for the results!

http://www.tranquility.net/~benedict/ Chris-435

This isn’t a guess. Not at all. But I swear to god, when I look hard at #6, I think to myself: “What the hell is Kevin doing watching Spawn.

Take care.

alsolikelife

Folks, this isn’t as hard as it looks — when you think that all of these films were for the Shooting Project, notice that all of the relevant titles are listed on the left hand menu (well at least they’re supposed to show up there). So you just have to pick from that list of 42 films and match them to the images.